Round-up: Making a Ukraine deal stick. Monday deadline for Venezuela? Swastikas A-OK for Coast Guard.

Analysis of the week's events

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Making a Ukraine deal stick

Amid all the discussion of Trump’s latest Ukraine “peace” proposal, one problem has been curiously under-analyzed: how the White House would make sure any deal was not simply reversed or modified by the next U.S. administration.

American participation in international agreements comes in two basic flavors. The first is a formal treaty. This is something that is negotiated by a president and then presented to the Senate for ratification. After it is ratified, it becomes the law of the land, and only a future vote by the Senate can nullify it. The other type is an “executive agreement”. This is basically just a gentleman’s agreement between the current U.S. government and some current foreign government. It doesn’t have any legal force, and the next president can undo it on a whim.

Understandably, formal treaties tend to be much more durable than executive agreements. It’s much harder to get the Senate to agree to nullify something than it is for the president just to make a declaration. That’s why things like NATO, which are formal treaties, endure, and things like Barack Obama’s Iran deal or U.S. participation in the Paris Climate Accords have been easily reversed.

So the question is, which sort of agreement is any Ukraine deal going to be?

In recent decades, there has been a big shift away from formal treaties and towards executive agreements. A simple reason for this is political polarization: the Senate requires 60 votes to approve a treaty, and it’s extremely hard to get 60 senators to agree on anything. Obama would have preferred his Iran nuclear deal to be a formal treaty - and indeed the Middle East might look very different today if it had been - but he couldn’t get the required majority in the Senate, so instead he made it an executive agreement.

Easy reversibility is not the only drawback to executive agreements. They also make it extremely hard for U.S. negotiating partners to trust that Washington is going to abide by its commitments. Why should a foreign country go out on a limb and start implementing concessions if the U.S. might just back out of the whole thing a few years from now? Treaties are supposed to create a predictable environment in which mutual trust pays off. Executive agreements don’t do that.

All of this matters for any Ukraine deal because it is hard to imagine any such deal making it through the Senate. It’s not just that the Republicans would require quite a few Democratic votes to pass a treaty. It’s also the fact that Republicans themselves are deeply divided on this issue, with traditional security-oriented senators pitted against MAGA nationalists who don’t care much about Ukraine. And with Trump’s grip on his party weakening, he probably won’t be able to corral them into passing something.

So besides everything else, this presents another intractable problem for any deal. The U.S. can perhaps strong-arm Kyiv into accepting poor terms, but it can’t ram a bad deal through the U.S. Senate. And that means that if the deal depends in any way on the U.S. making specific commitments - such as the withdrawal of troops from Eastern Europe, or opposing Ukrainian NATO membership - those commitments are not going to be legally durable.

It’s another reason to think that the idea of some clean end to this conflict is a pipe dream, and the merry-go round will continue.

Monday deadline for Venezuela?

The U.S. military build-up in the Caribbean has continued, and the USS Gerald Ford is now on station. The Ford is the most advanced aircraft carrier in the world and can bring an enormous amount of destructive force to bear. The question now is whether and when it is going to be unleashed on Venezuela.

So far as I can tell, the Trump regime’s preferred outcome from the current stand-off is for Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro to agree to go into exile (Cuba is apparently not interested in hosting him). If he doesn’t do that, then the threat of a massive bombardment of Venezuela is on the table.

And Washington may have set a deadline of sorts for moving into that final phase of its pressure campaign. The White House has said that on Monday it will designate the “Cartel of the Suns” - a term used to describe parts of the Venezuelan armed forces involved in drug trafficking - as a foreign terrorist organization. According to the Trump regime’s (contested) legal logic, this would then make them subject to legitimate attack by U.S. forces.